Networking at Westside Farmer's Market

As Andrew already knows (and did) our Ant 227 class assignment was to go the Westside Farmer's Market and observe. It was pretty cool. If you have been to the Southwedge Market, the vendors were very similiar.

I got there and walked around for a while and ended up talking with a few people that I already knew (one was the person who ran Urban Fellows when I did it and other was a neighborhood resident who is on the parish council for St. Monica's church...) blah blah.

I talked with each of them for a while and brought up what we were doing. Mary told me about some things she had going on which I wrote down but don't need to exactly get into. But she reiterated how difficult the transportation issues would be with creating a center. She suggested that I go to the YMCA and Boys and Girls Club in particular to see what programs they have going on and to talk about joint effort. I've also been hearing more from other students about administration road blocks (both on the UR end and community end) so this is something for us to think about.

Mary relayed to me how important she felt mentoring was for the community and how programs that emphasize leadership are really important too. She thought mentoring would be a difficult area, but one that more people to explore. She was telling me about how tutoring initiatives seem quite popular right now (which seemed bad...kind of like everyone is doing it, so we should do something more innovative). That was the sense I got from her.

Second person I talked to:
John Curran, the St. Monica's guy. He talked to me a little about how St. Monica's School is now a Math, Science Charter School (as Mollie mentioned to us) but that they have extra space in the building and also have after school programs. I think we definitely need to investigate that since it is so close.

John says we definitely need to talk with John Demott (who we already identified as a contact point in our meeting with Mollie last night).

Conclusion:
As we move forward, I think it's important for us to keep in mind that so many programs currently exist or are trying to start up and that we might want to look into joining some pre-existing effort. I'm realizing how difficult it is to start something completely from scratch. The impression I got today was that if we are trying to do something radical, we should start fresh. However, many programs that are just getting off the ground already have a strong base of students with whom we can work on their own turf (which means transportation issues dissapear and maintaining our own space isn't an issue).

Obviously I'm still open to anything, I'm just seeing patterns among people talking about the community, even this early on that we might want to keep in mind.

Ciao a tutti (bye to you all)
-Alicia